PD James - obituary - Telegraph Obituaries PD James - obituary 'Queen of Crime’ who delighted millions with her poet-sleuth Adam Dalgliesh and wrote a sequel to Pride and Prejudice PD James in 2009 Photo: Andrew Crowley 2:31PM GMT 27 Nov 2014 Comments Baroness James of Holland Park, better known as P D James, who has died aged 94, was among the most celebrated in a long and distinguished line of women crime writers stretching back to Dorothy L Sayers and Agatha Christie, with neither of whom she cared to be compared. During more than 50 years as an author, her books showed an elegance of characterisation and an aptitude for capturing atmosphere that blurred distinctions between classic detective stories and the conventional novel. She admitted that she had started writing crime fiction because she thought it would be easier to have a story published in that genre before going on to produce “proper” novels. She stayed with what she called “traditional English detective fiction” because she found she could still explore human behaviour within the formal structure of the crime genre.

Even her final novel, Death Comes to Pemberley (2011), a sequel to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, is a mystery story that opens with a brutal murder. A vigorous, beaming woman who described herself as “grandmotherly”, P D James had a frank and sociable exterior that belied a fascination with pain and death, often graphically described in her books. “Murder isn’t pleasant,” she explained. “It’s an ugly thing and a cruel thing. Let those who want pleasant murders read Agatha Christie.” She also admitted that if she were reading one of her own books, she would feel that she was reading “a woman with such a strong love of order and tradition that she is obviously covering in her own personality some basic turbulence and insecurity”. Any insecurities of James’s were well disguised. A long and illustrious career in the Home Office led to a period as a magistrate, appointments to various cultural bodies, including the British Council and the BBC (as a governor), and finally to a place in the House of Lords, where she took the Conservative whip and lobbied for the arts.

Related Articles Michael Dibdin 04 Apr 2007 Becoming a pillar of the literary establishment rather late in life — she set up as a full-time writer only after retiring from the Civil Service in 1979, shortly before turning 60 — P D James threw herself into literary life with remarkable zest. She became chairman of the Society of Authors at 64, joined the board of the Arts Council at 68, and in 1987 chaired the judging panel for the Booker Prize; on television in 1990 she chaired her own books programme, Speaking Volumes, with characteristic shrewdness and wit, becoming perhaps the first television presenter to describe herself, at 70, as “an old woman”. In these and her other public roles she proved both fluent and forceful, and perennially good-humoured. While guest editor of the Today programme in 2009, she memorably took the BBC director-general Mark Thompson to task over the corporation’s failings. She was awarded the Nick Clarke journalism prize for the interview. Her private life, in its middle years at least, was cruelly hard.

But she retained her great capacity for friendship and was splendidly clubbable. Phyllis Dorothy James was born on August 3 1920 in Oxford. When her father, an ill-paid tax officer, was transferred to the Inland Revenue in Cambridge, she enrolled at Cambridge High School for Girls. Although she became a star pupil — excelling at English — there was never any question of her education continuing beyond the age of 16. Hopes of a university degree ended when her father, “a man not disposed to educate girls”, told her he could not afford the fees. Instead, at 17, she went to work in a dreary tax office at Ely; more than 50 years later she would still wince at the memory and lament the sheer waste of time. During the Second World War she was in Cambridge, engaged in the no less dreary chore of issuing ration books, and in 1941 she married Connor Bantry White, a medical student, with whom she had two daughters. Later in the war, White qualified as a doctor but was badly affected by his wartime experiences and returned in 1945 suffering from schizophrenia.

He never recovered and spent the rest of his life in and out of various hospitals until his death in 1964. In 1949 Phyllis White and her husband moved in with his parents. Faced with the responsibility of being the family breadwinner, she took a job keeping medical records. In the evenings she studied for a diploma in hospital administration. For the next 10 years she worked for the North West Metropolitan Regional Hospital Board, eventually becoming principal administrative assistant. Meanwhile, she was not only nursing her husband but also bringing up her two girls. As she approached 40, Phyllis White began to fear that she would never fulfil her ambition of becoming a writer. “It was a now or never situation,” she recalled. “I didn’t want to end up saying to my children and grandchildren: 'I always thought I’d be a writer.’ ” In 1959, as P D James, she began to plot her first novel, Cover Her Face, which introduced her master detective (and poet), Adam Dalgliesh. James endowed him with the qualities she most admired in men: “courage, compassion, high intelligence and sensitivity”.

She agreed that it would be unusual to find a senior detective who was also a successful poet, but argued that “we do tend to stereotype people. Why shouldn’t a policeman write poems?” Working for two hours each morning before leaving for work, P D James completed the novel in 1961. Her agent approached Faber and Faber and suggested that they needed a new crime writer to replace Cyril Hare, who had recently died. James recalled that she fully expected to be rejected, but Faber accepted her book immediately and Cover Her Face was published in 1962. It was an instant success. “She would get reviews in the Times Literary Supplement which were like love letters,” her agent remembered. Although Cover Her Face was set in a country house and dealt with the death of a parlourmaid, her second novel A Mind To Murder (1963) saw James on (for her) more familiar ground. This story was set in a psychiatric practice and gave James the opportunity to explore the device of the “closed community”, a setting which she favoured in her later books.

PD James examining a razor blade, 1987 (SYGMA/CORBIS) A Mind To Murder also gave P D James the chance to draw on her experience of hospital administration, providing an accurate sense of realism. Hospitals featured again in Shroud for a Nightingale (1971), set in a nursing school where a student nurse is poisoned. An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (1972) was set in the microbiology department of a Cambridge college; The Black Tower (1975) dealt with a home for incurables, and Death of an Expert Witness (1977) with the murder of a forensic scientist. Meanwhile, following the death of her husband, P D James had resumed evening classes and in 1968 her studies led to her passing exams for a senior post at the Home Office. She worked as a principal in the police department until 1972, when she moved to the department responsible for criminal policy, specialising in what was then known as juvenile delinquency. There she acquired detailed first-hand knowledge of forensic science, juvenile offenders and other subjects which she drew on in her subsequent career as a novelist.

Her experiences in the National Health Service and Whitehall were also instrumental in teaching her how to chair a committee with an almost feline mixture of briskness and cunning. Certainly, P D James enjoyed the contrasts in her working lives. “I am a writer who needs the demands of an outside job,” she noted. During her time at the Home Office she took advantage of her access to so many experts to check the authenticity of methods used in her books. For Death of an Expert Witness, James checked every aspect of forensic analysis of criminal evidence. But reviewers were more impressed with her characterisation. “James’s insight into sexual fears and needs is profound,” wrote one critic. “She makes of even her murderers and victims human beings we can pity.” As for her hero Adam Dalgliesh, she always insisted that he was not the man she would have liked to marry, but the man she might like to have been. As the burden of work grew, she used to complain, only half-jokingly, that what she really needed was a good wife.

For most of her writing life P D James was saddled with the sobriquet “Queen (or First Lady) of Crime”, a crown which the media had handed to her following the death of Agatha Christie in 1976. But she was at pains to point out that she differed from Christie (“such a bad writer”) in that she cared about the victim and thought that treating the corpse as simply part of a puzzle “trivialised death”. Following her retirement from the Home Office in 1979, P D James increased her writing output. Innocent Blood (1980), which dealt with an adopted child who discovers her real parents were child-murderers, was followed by The Skull Beneath the Skin (1982) and A Taste for Death (1986), dealing with the murder of a politician in a south London church. As her literary output increased, so did other calls on her time. In 1985 she was asked to lecture on detective fiction at Boston University and in the same year produced her first play, Private Treason. Two years later P D James was appearing on the literary television programme Book Choice.

Also in 1987, when she helped to judge the Booker Prize, she recalled being interviewed for the newspapers and their being very eager to have her photograph taken “clutching a dagger or carving knife”. Having been appointed OBE in 1983, she became a magistrate while writing Devices And Desires (1989), and in 1991 was created a life peer. The death of her husband when she was only 44 caused her great and abiding distress. Death out of sequence — and particularly the death of a child — remained for her “the most awful thing that can happen to a human being”. She was sustained not only by a remarkable inner strength, but also by her two daughters (and, later, grandchildren) to whom she remained devoted. She was also a committed Anglican: she was horrified when no one seemed to realise that the title of her novel Devices and Desires came from the Book of Common Prayer. P D James was never a prolific writer, unlike many of her contemporaries, notably Ruth Rendell, her friend in the House of Lords with whom she was often compared and who averaged two books a year.

For the first decade of her writing life, James averaged one every two years. This was partly because she was an author who took infinite pains; there was nothing slapdash about her prose, and although the earlier novels were, in the classic English tradition, comparatively short books, her later ones such as Devices and Desires and The Murder Room (2003) were more than 400 pages long. While never neglecting the disciplines of plot, which she relished, she liked to take time exploring character in depth and, in particular, creating a sense of place. She used to say that all her novels began with the setting. Ideas often came to her when she was out walking. She was especially good on Suffolk, which she had known since family camping holidays near Lowestoft and where, in later years, she bought a cottage at Southwold. Her descriptions of English country churches were both loving and evocative, reflecting her interest in church architecture and her passion for the language of the Authorised Version of the Bible.

“Clerics have debased the Authorised Version,” she complained, “presumably on the basis that they are better writers than Cranmer or that God is unable to appreciate the more subtle rhythms of 17th-century prose.” In her later years her fellow authors awarded her the coveted Crime Writers’ Association Diamond Dagger for a lifetime’s achievement. Her books were filmed and televised and she travelled the world lecturing, signing and taking on visiting fellowships in Boston, California and Toronto. She published A Time to Be in Earnest, her “Fragment of Autobiography”, in 1999, and the final Dalgliesh novel, The Private Patient, about the murder of a journalist at a plastic surgery clinic, in 2008. More than almost any other crime writer, P D James transcended the genre to produce novels which stood on their own as works of literature. She herself observed that “a first-class mystery should also be a first-class novel”. Having made a late start in the literary stakes, by the end she was as grande a dame as any, although she never gave herself airs and was ultimately as happy with her cats and her grandchildren as she was at the House of Lords with the great and good.

Lady James is survived by her two daughters. Baroness James of Holland Park, born August 3 1920, died November 27 2014 PD James dies: Cameron leads tributes to 'queen of crime fiction'| News | The Week UK PD James dies: Cameron leads tributes to 'queen of crime fiction' Nov 27, 2014 email The celebrated detective writer PD James, who wrote more than 20 bestselling novels, has died aged 94. She passed away "peacefully at her home in Oxford", according to her publisher, and is survived by her two children, five grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren. Often described as the queen of crime fiction, her best loved books include The Children of Men, The Murder Room and Death Comes to Pemberley, a pastiche of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. She sold millions of copies of her books worldwide and many were adapted for film and television. Born Phyllis Dorothy James, she was elevated to the House of Lords in 1991 and took the title Baroness James of Holland Park.

David Cameron led the tributes, saying he was "saddened to hear of the death of PD James, one of the UK’s greatest crime writers, who thrilled and inspired generations of readers." Fellow crime writer Ian Rankin also expressed his sadness at the news. "Every event I did with her was a joy," he said. "Sharp intellect, ready wit. She will be missed." "I salute the great PD James for so many reasons," said Scottish crime writer Val McDermid. "Today, I've lost a friend as well as a teacher. There was nothing cosy about Phyllis." James believed she was born to write and often said it was talent that could not be taught. "I am lucky to have written as many books as I have," she said. "It has been a joy." She told the BBC the process had become more difficult as she grew older as it "takes longer for the inspiration to come". But she said "the thing about being a writer is that you need to write". "While I am alive, I shall write.

There will be a time to stop writing but that will probably be when I come to a stop, too." Sign up for our daily newsletter Newsletter 'Queen of Crime' PD James passes away at 94 | afr.com 'Queen of Crime' PD James passes away at 94 Share Share on Reddit As she approached 40, Phyllis White began to fear that she would never fulfil her ambition. "It was a now or never situation," she recalled. "I didn't want to end up saying to my children and grandchildren: 'I always thought I'd be a writer.'?" Photo: AP Baroness James of Holland Park, better known as PD James, who has died aged 94, was among the most celebrated in a long and distinguished line of women crime writers stretching back to Dorothy L Sayers and Agatha Christie, with neither of whom she cared to be compared. During more than 50 years as an author, her books showed an elegance of characterisation and an aptitude for capturing atmosphere that blurred distinctions between classic detective stories and the conventional novel. She admitted that she had started writing crime fiction because she thought it would be easier to have a story published in that genre before going on to produce "proper" novels.

She stayed with what she called "traditional English detective fiction" because she found she could still explore human behaviour within the formal structure of the crime genre. Even her final novel, Death Comes to Pemberley (2011), a sequel to Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, is a mystery story that opens with a brutal murder. A vigorous, beaming woman who described herself as "grandmotherly", PD James had a frank and sociable exterior that belied a fascination with pain and death, often graphically described in her books. "Murder isn't pleasant," she explained. "It's an ugly thing and a cruel thing. Let those who want pleasant murders read Agatha Christie." She also admitted that if she were reading one of her own books, she would feel that she was reading "a woman with such a strong love of order and tradition that she is obviously covering in her own personality some basic turbulence and insecurity". Any insecurities of James's were well disguised.

A long and illustrious career in the Home Office led to a period as a magistrate, appointments to various cultural bodies, including the British Council and the BBC (as a governor), and finally to a place in the House of Lords, where she took the Conservative whip and lobbied for the arts. Related Quotes View all announcements Becoming a pillar of the literary establishment rather late in life - she set up as a full-time writer only after retiring from the Civil Service in 1979, shortly before turning 60 - PD James threw herself into literary life with remarkable zest. She became chairman of the Society of Authors at 64, joined the board of the Arts Council at 68, and in 1987 chaired the judging panel for the Booker Prize; on television in 1990 she chaired her own books programme, Speaking Volumes, with characteristic shrewdness and wit, becoming perhaps the first television presenter to describe herself, at 70, as "an old woman". In these and her other public roles she proved both fluent and forceful, and perennially good-humoured.

While guest editor of the Today programme in 2009, she memorably took the BBC director-general Mark Thompson to task over the corporation's failings. She was awarded the Nick Clarke journalism prize for the interview. Her private life, in its middle years at least, was cruelly hard. But she retained her great capacity for friendship and was splendidly clubbable. Phyllis Dorothy James was born on August 3 1920 in Oxford. When her father, an ill-paid tax officer, was transferred to the Inland Revenue in Cambridge, she enrolled at Cambridge High School for Girls. Although she became a star pupil - excelling at English - there was never any question of her education continuing beyond the age of 16. Hopes of a university degree ended when her father, "a man not disposed to educate girls", told her he could not afford the fees. Instead, at 17, she went to work in a dreary tax office at Ely; more than 50 years later she would still wince at the memory and lament the sheer waste of time.

During the Second World War she was in Cambridge, engaged in the no less dreary chore of issuing ration books, and in 1941 she married Connor Bantry White, a medical student, with whom she had two daughters. Later in the war, White qualified as a doctor but was badly affected by his wartime experiences and returned in 1945 suffering from schizophrenia. He never recovered and spent the rest of his life in and out of various hospitals until his death in 1964. In 1949 Phyllis White and her husband moved in with his parents. Faced with the responsibility of being the family breadwinner, she took a job keeping medical records. In the evenings she studied for a diploma in hospital administration. For the next 10 years she worked for the North West Metropolitan Regional Hospital Board, eventually becoming principal administrative assistant. Meanwhile, she was not only nursing her husband but also bringing up her two girls. As she approached 40, Phyllis White began to fear that she would never fulfil her ambition of becoming a writer. "It was a now or never situation," she recalled.

"I didn't want to end up saying to my children and grandchildren: 'I always thought I'd be a writer.'?" In 1959, as PD James, she began to plot her first novel, Cover Her Face, which introduced her master detective (and poet), Adam Dalgliesh. James endowed him with the qualities she most admired in men: "courage, compassion, high intelligence and sensitivity". She agreed that it would be unusual to find a senior detective who was also a successful poet, but argued that "we do tend to stereotype people. Why shouldn't a policeman write poems?" Working for two hours each morning before leaving for work, PD James completed the novel in 1961. Her agent approached Faber and Faber and suggested that they needed a new crime writer to replace Cyril Hare, who had recently died. James recalled that she fully expected to be rejected, but Faber accepted her book immediately and Cover Her Face was published in 1962. It was an instant success. "She would get reviews in the Times Literary Supplement which were like love letters," her agent remembered.

Although Cover Her Face was set in a country house and dealt with the death of a parlourmaid, her second novel A Mind To Murder (1963) saw James on (for her) more familiar ground. This story was set in a psychiatric practice and gave James the opportunity to explore the device of the "closed community", a setting which she favoured in her later books. A Mind To Murder also gave PD James the chance to draw on her experience of hospital administration, providing an accurate sense of realism. Hospitals featured again in Shroud for a Nightingale (1971), set in a nursing school where a student nurse is poisoned. An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (1972) was set in the microbiology department of a Cambridge college; The Black Tower (1975) dealt with a home for incurables, and Death of an Expert Witness (1977) with the murder of a forensic scientist. Meanwhile, following the death of her husband, PD James had resumed evening classes and in 1968 her studies led to her passing exams for a senior post at the Home Office.

She worked as a principal in the police department until 1972, when she moved to the department responsible for criminal policy, specialising in what was then known as juvenile delinquency. There she acquired detailed first-hand knowledge of forensic science, juvenile offenders and other subjects which she drew on in her subsequent career as a novelist. Her experiences in the National Health Service and Whitehall were also instrumental in teaching her how to chair a committee with an almost feline mixture of briskness and cunning. Certainly, PD James enjoyed the contrasts in her working lives. "I am a writer who needs the demands of an outside job," she noted. During her time at the Home Office she took advantage of her access to so many experts to check the authenticity of methods used in her books. For Death of an Expert Witness, James checked every aspect of forensic analysis of criminal evidence. But reviewers were more impressed with her characterisation. "James's insight into sexual fears and needs is profound," wrote one critic. "She makes of even her murderers and victims human beings we can pity." As for her hero Adam Dalgliesh, she always insisted that he was not the man she would have liked to marry, but the man she might like to have been.

As the burden of work grew, she used to complain, only half-jokingly, that what she really needed was a good wife. For most of her writing life PD James was saddled with the sobriquet "Queen (or First Lady) of Crime", a crown which the media had handed to her following the death of Agatha Christie in 1976. But she was at pains to point out that she differed from Christie ("such a bad writer") in that she cared about the victim and thought that treating the corpse as simply part of a puzzle "trivialised death". Following her retirement from the Home Office in 1979, PD James increased her writing output. Innocent Blood (1980), which dealt with an adopted child who discovers her real parents were child-murderers, was followed by The Skull Beneath the Skin (1982) and A Taste for Death (1986), dealing with the murder of a politician in a south London church. As her literary output increased, so did other calls on her time. In 1985 she was asked to lecture on detective fiction at Boston University and in the same year produced her first play, Private Treason.

Two years later PD James was appearing on the literary television programme Book Choice. Also in 1987, when she helped to judge the Booker Prize, she recalled being interviewed for the newspapers and their being very eager to have her photograph taken "clutching a dagger or carving knife". Having been appointed OBE in 1983, she became a magistrate while writing Devices And Desires (1989), and in 1991 was created a life peer. The death of her husband when she was only 44 caused her great and abiding distress. Death out of sequence - and particularly the death of a child - remained for her "the most awful thing that can happen to a human being". She was sustained not only by a remarkable inner strength, but also by her two daughters (and, later, grandchildren) to whom she remained devoted. She was also a committed Anglican: she was horrified when no one seemed to realise that the title of her novel Devices and Desires came from the Book of Common Prayer. PD James was never a prolific writer, unlike many of her contemporaries, notably Ruth Rendell, her friend in the House of Lords with whom she was often compared and who averaged two books a year.

For the first decade of her writing life, James averaged one every two years. This was partly because she was an author who took infinite pains; there was nothing slapdash about her prose, and although the earlier novels were, in the classic English tradition, comparatively short books, her later ones such as Devices and Desires and The Murder Room (2003) were more than 400 pages long. While never neglecting the disciplines of plot, which she relished, she liked to take time exploring character in depth and, in particular, creating a sense of place. She used to say that all her novels began with the setting. Ideas often came to her when she was out walking. She was especially good on Suffolk, which she had known since family camping holidays near Lowestoft and where, in later years, she bought a cottage at Southwold. Her descriptions of English country churches were both loving and evocative, reflecting her interest in church architecture and her passion for the language of the Authorised Version of the Bible.

"Clerics have debased the Authorised Version," she complained, "presumably on the basis that they are better writers than Cranmer or that God is unable to appreciate the more subtle rhythms of 17th-century prose." In her later years her fellow authors awarded her the coveted Crime Writers' Association Diamond Dagger for a lifetime's achievement. Her books were filmed and televised and she travelled the world lecturing, signing and taking on visiting fellowships in Boston, California and Toronto. She published A Time to Be in Earnest, her "Fragment of Autobiography", in 1999, and the final Dalgliesh novel, The Private Patient, about the murder of a journalist at a plastic surgery clinic, in 2008. More than almost any other crime writer, PD James transcended the genre to produce novels which stood on their own as works of literature. She herself observed that "a first-class mystery should also be a first-class novel". Having made a late start in the literary stakes, by the end she was as grande a dame as any, although she never gave herself airs and was ultimately as happy with her cats and her grandchildren as she was at the House of Lords with the great and good.

Lady James is survived by her two daughters. Baroness James of Holland Park, born August 3 1920, died November 27 2014 The Daily Telegraph P. D. James | Wiki | 📖 Everipedia Embed / Widget 28 VIEWS Phyllis Dorothy James, Baroness James of Holland Park, OBE , FRSA , FRSL (3 August 1920 – 27 November 2014), known as P. D. James, was an English crime writer. She rose to fame for her series of detective novels starring police commander and poet Adam Dalgliesh . [3] Life and career James was born in Oxford , the daughter of Sidney James, a tax inspector, and educated at the British School in Ludlow and Cambridge High School for Girls . [4] She had to leave school at the age of sixteen to work because her family did not have much money and her father did not believe in higher education for girls. She worked in a tax office for three years and later found a job as an assistant stage manager for a theatre group. In 1941, she married Ernest Connor Bantry White, an army doctor.

They had two daughters, Clare and Jane. When White returned from the Second World War , he was experiencing mental illness, and James was forced to provide for the whole family until her husband's death in 1964. With her husband in a psychiatric institution and their daughters being mostly cared for by his parents, James studied hospital administration and from 1949 to 1968 worked for a hospital board in London. [5] She began writing in the mid-1950s. [6] Her first novel, Cover Her Face , featuring the investigator and poet Adam Dalgliesh of New Scotland Yard , named after a teacher at Cambridge High School, was published in 1962. [8] Many of James's mystery novels take place against the backdrop of UK bureaucracies, such as the criminal justice system and the National Health Service , in which she worked for decades starting in the 1940s. Two years after the publication of Cover Her Face, James's husband died, and she took a position as a civil servant within the criminal section of the Home Office . She worked in government service until her retirement in 1979.

In 1991, James was created a life peer as Baroness James of Holland Park and sat in the House of Lords as a Conservative . She was an Anglican and a lay patron of the Prayer Book Society. Her 2001 work, Death in Holy Orders , displays her familiarity with the inner workings of church hierarchy. Her later novels were often set in a community closed in some way, such as a publishing house or barristers' chambers, a theological college, an island or a private clinic. Talking About Detective Fiction was published in 2009. Over her writing career, James also wrote many essays and short stories for periodicals and anthologies , which have yet to be collected. She revealed in 2011 that The Private Patient was the final Dalgliesh novel. [9] As guest editor of BBC Radio 4 's Today programme in December 2009, James conducted an interview with the Director General of the BBC, Mark Thompson , in which she seemed critical of some of his decisions.

Regular Today presenter Evan Davis commented that "She shouldn't be guest editing; she should be permanently presenting the programme." [10] In 2008, she was inducted into the International Crime Writing Hall of Fame at the inaugural ITV3 Crime Thriller Awards. [2] In August 2014, James was one of 200 public figures who were signatories to a letter to The Guardian opposing Scottish independence in the run-up to September's referendum on that issue . [2] James died at her home in Oxford on 27 November 2014, aged 94. [2] She is survived by her two daughters, Clare and Jane, five grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren. [14] Clare had previously been signatory to a campaign for women to be able to inherit noble titles, instead of these being restricted to the male line. [2] Film and television During the 1980s, many of James's mystery novels were adapted for television by Anglia Television for the ITV network in the UK. These productions have been broadcast in other countries, including the US on the PBS network. They featured Roy Marsden as Adam Dalgliesh.

According to James in conversation with Bill Link on 3 May 2001 at the Writer's Guild Theatre, Los Angeles, Marsden "is not my idea of Dalgliesh, but I would be very surprised if he were." [2] The BBC adapted Death in Holy Orders in 2003, and The Murder Room in 2004, both as one-off dramas starring Martin Shaw as Dalgliesh. Her novel The Children of Men (1992) was the basis for the feature film Children of Men (2006), directed by Alfonso Cuarón and starring Clive Owen , Julianne Moore and Michael Caine . [17] Despite substantial changes from the book, James was reportedly pleased with the adaptation and proud to be associated with the film. [18] Books PD James, crime novelist, dies aged 94 - BBC News BBC News PD James, crime novelist, dies aged 94 27 November 2014 Image caption PD James created the elegant, intellectual detective Adam Dalgliesh Crime novelist PD James, who penned more than 20 books, has died aged 94.

Her agent said she died "peacefully at her home in Oxford" on Thursday morning. The author's books, many featuring sleuth Adam Dalgliesh, sold millions of books around the world, with various adaptations for television and film. Her best known novels include The Children of Men, The Murder Room and Pride and Prejudice spin-off Death Comes to Pemberley. The author told the BBC last year she was working on another detective story and it was "important to write one more". "With old age, it becomes very difficult. It takes longer for the inspiration to come, but the thing about being a writer is that you need to write," she said. "I hope I would know myself whether a book was worth publishing. I think while I am alive, I shall write. There will be a time to stop writing but that will probably be when I come to a stop, too." In a statement, James's publishers Faber and Faber said: "This is a very sad day for us at Faber. "It is difficult to express our profound sadness at losing PD James, one of the world's great writers and a Faber author since her first publication in 1962.

"She was so very remarkable in every aspect of her life, an inspiration and great friend to us all. It is a privilege to publish her extraordinary books. Working with her was always the best of times, full of joy. We will miss her hugely." I am lucky to have written as many books as I have. It has been a joy. PD James Rex Features Fellow authors paid tribute to James, including Ruth Rendell, who was a close friend and fellow life peer. "She was wonderfully accurate in her police work; she really took great pains about it. She took great care and she got it right. She did not make mistakes, she saw to it that she didn't," she told BBC Radio 4's Front Row programme. "She knew very well what she thought a perfect universe would be and she wanted her books to come close to that, to show what it should be. "She held up people who were bad - who acted wrongly - as examples of the kind of people she didn't like and didn't want others to be affected by," Rendell told John Wilson on Thursday's show. Ian Rankin who tweeted : "So sad about PD James. Every event I did with her was a joy.

Sharp intellect, ready wit." US crime writer Patricia Cornwell said : "RIP PD James and thanks for encouraging me when I was getting started." Val McDermid said : "I salute the great PD James for so many reasons. Today, I've lost a friend as well as a teacher. There was nothing cosy about Phyllis." Booker Prize winner AS Byatt told BBC News "the world will be a worse place without her". "The writing was terribly good. When people in her books died, other characters' lives changed too. She was working with real people that she cared about. "She said crime fiction should win the Booker and tried to have it taken seriously. Phyllis was on the borderline between crime fiction and literary fiction. "She attended to detail and knew about chemistry and the nature of poisons and stabbings.

She was always in control and always knew where she was going and what would happen." Image copyright Rex Features Image caption Roy Marsden (centre) starred as detective Adam Dalgliesh in a series of PD James adaptations for ITV Image caption Martin Shaw took over the Dalgliesh character on the BBC adaptations Born Phyllis Dorothy James on 3 August 1920, the author did not publish her first novel, Cover Her Face, until she was 42. It was a critical success, but she continued working for the Home Office - where she held a job in the forensic science department and then the criminal law department until 1979. She gained international recognition in 1980 after the publication of her eighth book, Innocent Blood. During the 1980s, many of James's Dalgliesh novels were adapted for television on ITV, starring Roy Marsden in the in lead role. The BBC later adapted Death in Holy Orders and The Murder Room in 2003 and 2004 respectively, starring Martin Shaw as the detective.

James's 1992 dystopian novel The Children of Men was also given the big screen treatment in 2006 with a film directed by Alfonso Cuaron and starring Clive Owen and Julianne Moore. The author was awarded the Crime Writers' Association's Diamond Dagger award in 1987 for lifetime achievement, and received the Medal of Honour for Literature in 2005 by National Arts Club. She also served as a BBC governor from 1988 to 1993 and famously confronted former director general Mark Thompson in 2009 during an edition of BBC Radio 4's Today about the excessive pay packets given to some of its top executives. She grilled him while serving as a guest editor of the show, telling him it was "really quite extraordinary" 37 BBC bosses earned more than the prime minister. Thompson's successor Tony Hall paid tribute to the writer, calling her "a wonderful governor of the BBC, a brilliant author and a unique talent." "Throughout her career she made a significant contribution to public service broadcasting, and just last Christmas millions enjoyed BBC One's adaptation of Death Comes to Pemberley," he added.

In 1991 she was created a Conservative life peer - Baroness James of Holland Park - in recognition of her role. Crime Times Three - P. D. James - Google Books Crime Times Three What people are saying - Write a review We haven't found any reviews in the usual places. Contents Snippet view - 1991 Common terms and phrases Adam Dalgliesh anyway Baguley basement Bocock bottle Catherine chair clinic course Courtney-Briggs Cully Dalgleish Dalgliesh asked dead death Deborah Dettinger doctor door doubt Etherege expect eyes face Felix felt gave girl hand happened heard Hearne hospital Julia Pardoe killed knew looked Martha Martin Martingale Masterson Matron medical director minutes Miss Beale Miss Bolam Miss Liddell Morag Smith morning murder Nagle never night Nightingale House Nurse Bolam Nurse Dakers Nurse Fallon Nurse Goodale Nurse Pearce P. D.

James patient Peter Nagle police Priddy Proctor remember replied Reynold Price Riscoe Sally Jupp Sally's seemed Sergeant Shorthouse silence Sister Ambrose Sister Brumfett Sister Gearing Sister Rolfe someone spoke staff Steen Steiner Stephen Maxie Superintendent suppose sure surprised talk telephone tell There's thing told took turned voice waiting ward watched window woman wondered worry About the author (1981) P. D. James, pseudonym of Phyllis Dorothy James White, was born on August 3, 1920 in Oxford, England. During World War II, she served as a Red Cross nurse. She worked in administration for 19 years with the National Health Service. After the death of her husband in 1964, she took a Civil Service examination and became an administrator in the forensic science and criminal law divisions of the Department of Home Affairs. She spent 30 years in British Civil Service. She became Baroness James of Holland Park in 1991. Her first novel, Cover Her Face, was published in 1962.

She wrote approximately 20 books during her lifetime including the Adam Dalgliesh Mystery series, the Cordelia Gray Mystery series, and Death Comes to Pemberley. She became a full-time writer in 1979. Three titles in the Adam Dalgliesh Mystery series received the Silver Dagger award--Shroud for a Nightingale, The Black Tower, and A Taste for Death. In 2000, she published her autobiography, Time to Be in Earnest. Her dystopian novel, The Children of Men, was adapted into a movie in 2006. She received the Diamond Dagger award for lifetime achievement. She died on November 27, 2014 at the age of 94. P.D. James, novelist known as ‘Queen of Crime,’ dies at 94 | The Seattle Times P.D.

James, novelist known as ‘Queen of Crime,’ dies at 94 Originally published November 27, 2014 at 8:50 pm Updated November 28, 2014 at 6:13 am Share story MARILYN STASIO The New York Times Phyllis Dorothy James White, who became Baroness James of Holland Park in 1991 but was better known as “the Queen of Crime” for the multilayered novels she wrote as P.D. James, died Thursday at home in Oxford, England. She was 94. Her death was announced by her publisher in Britain, Faber & Faber. Ms. James was one of those rare authors whose work stood up to the inevitable and usually invidious comparisons with classic authors of the detective genre, such as Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers and Margery Allingham. A consummate stylist, she accumulated numerous awards for the 18 crime novels produced during a writing career spanning a half-century. Seven of her mysteries were adapted for the public-television series “!” and were broadcast in Britain and the United States. Ms.

James bristled at the frequent comparisons to genre authors who wrote during the golden age of the English novel in the 1930s. Most Read Stories Unlimited Digital Access. $1 for 4 weeks. “That kind of crime writing was dull,” she once said in an interview, “in the sense that it was unrealistic, prettifying and romanticizing murder, but having little to do with real blood-and-guts tragedy. One simply cannot take these as realistic books about murder, about the horror of murder, the tragedy of murder, the harm that murder does.” Many critics and many of her peers have said that by virtue of the complexity of her plots, the psychological density of her characters and the moral context in which she viewed criminal violence, Ms. James surpassed her classic models and elevated the literary status of the modern detective novel. She is often cited, in particular, for the cerebral depth and emotional sensibilities of Adam Dalgliesh, the introspective Scotland Yard detective and published poet who functions as the hero of virtually all of her novels.

Her intention with Dalgliesh, she told the British critic and writer Julian Symons in 1986, was to create a detective “quite unlike the Lord Peter Wimsey kind of gentlemanly amateur” popularized by Sayers. Ms. James envisioned a realistic cop as her protagonist, a dedicated and skilled professional — and yet “something more than just a policeman, you see, a complex and sensitive human being.” Her readers found this character profoundly romantic. Even she thought he was sexy. “I could never fall in love with a man who was handsome but stupid,” she said. Still, Dalgliesh remained a self-contained, even aloof figure. “There’s a splinter of ice in his character,” his creator said. Novelist A.S. Byatt said the realism of Ms. James’ writing was one of its strengths. “When people in her books died, the other characters’ lives changed as they would in real life,” Byatt told the BBC. “Phyllis (James) was working with real people that she cared about. “The world will be a worse place without her.” Female sleuth In “An Unsuitable Job for a Woman,” Ms.

James introduced Cordelia Gray, a young private investigator whose professional competence and independent spirit put her in the vanguard of an emerging generation of female sleuths. These included Liza Cody’s Anna Lee in Britain, and Sara Paretsky’s V.I. Warshawski and Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone in the United States. Ms. James’ forthright portrayal of a strong, free and highly intelligent young woman delighted her readers. But it was Dalgliesh who won their hearts — and the author’s. “Perhaps Adam Dalgliesh is an idealized version of what I’d have liked to be if I had been born a man,” she once said. Roy Marsden played Dalgliesh in most of the “Mystery!” adaptations (Martin Shaw took over as Dalgliesh in later ones). Ms. James found Marsden to be a “good actor, but he’s not my Dalgliesh.” Unlike Marsden, Dalgliesh had a full head of hair and no mustache. And Ms.

James was troubled by “the class thing.” Her commander, she said, “wouldn’t wear some of the clothes Roy does, he wouldn’t wear his signet ring on the wrong finger, he wouldn’t have talked to Lady Ursula Berowne with his hand in his pocket, as he did.” Phyllis Dorothy James was born on Aug. 3, 1920, in Oxford, the eldest of three children of Dorothy and Sidney James, a civil servant who did not believe in inflicting too much education on his daughter. The family settled in Cambridge when she was 11, and before she left the Cambridge High School for Girls, at 16, she knew that she wanted to be a writer and that mysterious death intrigued her. “When I first heard that Humpty Dumpty fell off the wall,” she was fond of saying, “I immediately wondered: Did he fall — or was he pushed?” An early marriage to Ernest C.B. White, a medical student, and the outbreak of World War II halted her plans for a writing career. Ms. James gave birth to the first of her two daughters in 1942, during a bombing blitz. She served as a Red Cross nurse during the war.

When her husband returned from military service with a severe mental disability marked by bouts of violence that kept him virtually confined to hospitals and unable to work, Ms. James was forced to support her family. She went to work for the National Health Service and attended night classes in hospital administration. It took her three years to write her first mystery novel, “Cover Her Face,” by working in the early- morning hours before going off to her hospital job. She was 42 when it was published in Britain in 1962. (Like many of her books, it was published in the United States later.) The realistic hospital settings of three early novels, “A Mind to Murder,” “Shroud for a Nightingale” and “The Black Tower,” owe much to her 19 years of administrative experience with the National Health Service. Picked popular genre When she began writing, Ms. James chose the detective-story form because she enjoyed reading such novels and because she thought she would have a better chance of getting published if she wrote in a popular genre.

She told The Paris Review in 1995 that she “thought writing a detective story would be a wonderful apprenticeship for a ‘serious’ novelist because a detective story is very easy to write badly but difficult to write well.” The success of her first one persuaded her to stick with the detective-story form. “I came to believe that it is perfectly possible to remain within the constraints and conventions of the genre and be a serious writer, saying something true about men and women and their relationships and the society in which they live.” After the death of her husband at 44 in 1964, Ms. James took a civil-service examination and became an administrator in the forensic-science and criminal-law divisions of the Department of Home Affairs, a career that supplied her novels with the realistic procedural detail on which she prided herself. Although she rarely described actual murder, the bodies in her novels always made an indelible impression on the charladies, boys and other innocent bystanders who chanced upon them. “To many of them, it’s a really appalling and dreadful discovery,” the author said.

“I think that the reader should share that horror and that shock, so I make the descriptions just as realistic as I can.” On her retirement from government service in 1979, P.D. James — she chose the name because it was short and gender neutral — began devoting herself to her books full time, sometimes researching them meticulously for as long as a year before suiting down to write. To depict with accuracy the nuclear-power station where mayhem occurs in “Devices and Desires,” she toured power plants at Sizewell and Winfrith in England, even climbing into a protective suit and standing over a nuclear reactor to observe it closely. It was typical for her to place her stories in such dramatic settings. “Almost always, the idea for a book comes to me as a reaction to a particular place,” she said. “I like to create in books some kind of opposition between places and characters.” Her novel “Innocent Blood,” in 1980, was considered her breakthrough book in Britain and North America. Upon its publication, her small but loyal following exploded into mass international popularity. “Monday, I was ticking along as usual, and by Friday I was a millionaire,” she once said.

Since then, her novels have sold more than 10 million copies in America alone and have been translated into many languages. Modern morality drama Although reviewers frequently lauded Ms. James for “transcending the genre,” she was a champion of the detective mystery, which she called “a literary celebration of order and reason” and which she considered a modern morality drama by virtue of its affirmation of enduring social values. In turbulent times, she said, people turn to detective stories for reassurance as much as entertainment “because they do affirm the intelligibility of the universe, the moral norm, the sanctity of life.” One book in which she denied her readers this comfort was her 1992 dystopian novel “The Children of Men,” a futuristic look at a society in which humankind can no longer reproduce itself. It was adapted into a film in 2006, directed by Alfonso Cuarón. More characteristically, the members of the educated middle class in her novels grapple with the moral disorder that murder represents in their civilized lives. Although she claimed allegiance to no political party, Ms. James was a firm believer in the social contract between the government and its sovereign subjects.

She took pride in her seat in the House of Lords, and for many years served on the bench as a local magistrate. She liked to point out that her title was bestowed not because of her literary achievements, but because of her public service. She helped gain passage of British legislation that gives adopted children the right to learn the identities of their biological parents. She was one of the 10 governors of the BBC and she served on important arts councils. Her last novel, “Death Comes to Pemberley” in 2011, is a sequel and homage to Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice.” The series, starring Matthew Rhys and Anna Maxwell Martin, was adapted for a television miniseries in Britain in 2013 and recently aired in the United States as part of PBS’ “Masterpiece” series. Ms. James is survived by her daughters, Clare and Jane, and several grandchildren and great-grandchildren. For all her fidelity in depicting the dark side of human nature, Ms. James took no joy in the chaos of criminality. “I think I’m very frightened of violence,” she once said. “I hate it.

And it may be that by writing mysteries I am able, as it were, to exorcise this fear, which may very well be the same reason so many people enjoy reading a mystery.” MARILYN STASIO

Question: Which well-known crime writer, who died in 2014, took the title Baroness of Holland Park in 1991?
Answer: P D James